Alone with Everybody

This is an excerpt from Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island”

“Prolonged solitary travel, you see, affects people in different ways. It is an unnatural business to find yourself in a strange place with an underutilized brain and no particular reason for being there, and eventually it makes you go a little crazy. I’ve seen it in others often. Some solitary travellers start talking to themselves: little silently murmured conversations that they think no one else notices. Some desperately seek the company of strangers, striking up small talk at shop counters and hotel reception desks and then lingering awkwardly after it has become clear that the conversation has finished. Some become ravenous, obsessive sightseers, tramping from sight to sight with a guidebook in a lonely quest to see everything. Me, I get a sort of interrogative diarrhea. I ask private questions for which I cannot supply an answer. And so as I stood by a greengrocer’s in Thurso, looking at its darkened interior with pursed lips and a more or less empty head, from out of nowhere I thought, Why do they call it a grapefruit? And I knew that the process had started”.

I read this yesterday I felt like it basically summarized my internal thoughts perfectly. Yep, that’s what is wrong with me. Yesterday we had a social gathering at work at the end of the day and it was one of those moments where I was surrounded by people but felt so absolutely alone. Everything we discussed was so surface and it just made me feel terribly homesick. When I got home, my host, L had gotten me a bunch of brochures for things in the area and I looked through them and thought to myself, "All these things that we do, aren’t we just marking time until we die?" That’s not a normal thought, right? The other day I stopped at the bookstore to get the next book in a series I have been reading and the woman behind the counter struck up a conversation about my purchase because she had reviewed it for the bookstore. We started talking about television shows and I truly didn't want it to end. In my head I was thinking, be my friend! I’m nice! I usually don’t have those thoughts when I interact with someone who is selling me goods or services. Yes, I am alone too much.

It is a bank holiday this Monday. I was planning to maybe get out of town, but financially, it is best right now if I stay put. A co-worker has invited me to meet her in London Monday to go to the Tate Britain and see a photography exhibit and I am so thrilled to be doing something social. Also, L is letting me borrow her library card so I plan to visit there today.